Inspiring writers and getting started.
All you authors will benefit from reading, re-visiting and analysing favourite authors. This does not mean that you will copy their style. You need to find your own voice. YOUR readers will enjoy your stories, fiction and non-fiction, if these stories add value to their own and their lives. You need to work out how the style of a favourite author works and why readers love them.Michael Morpurgo is a favourite author for me. The man who wrote Warhouse, The Day the Whales Came, Private Peaceful and many more, and he was the children’s laureate from 2003 to 2005, his ideas and way of writing touch hearts and minds, often in an educational way.
In the Spectator Diary in late March he wrote about the lockdown and his writing process. He doesn’t like “the bleakness of silence” which writers have to endure. He needs a view from the window for “the reassurance that I’m not alone”. He often starts writing from his bed in the morning (like Robert Louis Stevenson, he adds).
He says that in normal times “my routine varied far too much to be called a routine. Now in this time of coronavirus I keep rigidly to it: Up at 8.30am, dressing gown on, wellies on…” What? I sense your question. Wellies on…?
He goes into the garden to pick kale for a smoothie, has “a quiet breakfast’ with his wife Clare. “Upstairs to scribble, my retelling of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare….Coffee soon. Back to the writing. Shower, shave.” You may not choose to follow in the footsteps of this highly experienced author ...
On my shelves and in my Kindle are books by favourite authors. Fiction includes:
1. Sebastian Barry, the Irish author who writes like a poet (On Canaan’s Side, Secret Scripture , Days
without End etc );
2. Walter Mosley, an American thriller of colour (and a favourite of President Obama); his main character is
PI Ezekiel (Easy) Rawkins, and some passages take your breath away so you have to re-read them to get
the air back into your lungs He has written a useful guide for authors: This Year You Write Your Novel
(2007).
3. William Boyd (I’m currently reading Restless), with his graceful and cool characterisation).
There are many more.........
A trio from non-fiction begins with:
1. Michelle Obama, whose memoir Becoming is a wonderful read in so many ways. 2. Sir Ken Robinson, the British educationist who now lives in the US and writes persuasively on how to make the school creative and active (rather than passive); his TED talk is worth watching. 3. Brené Brown, who talks on TED, and writes about the courage to get connected by showing vulnerability (Daring Greatly); her brand new podcast Unlocking Us is well worth subscribing to. What are your favourite authors? And why?
Choose your topic and make an outline
First you need to choose your topic: What interests you most? What can you daft from the top of your head without too much research? That is the undoing on most authors – they can’t get past their research. What is topic where you have knowledge and experience where you can inform and/or entertain your readers?
You are warned that your first draft needs to be a continuous stream of consciousness without ever looking back. That was the advice from my mentor and publisher, Mindy Gibbins-Klein (aka The Book Midwife) founder of Panoma Press.
So you write a synopsis, particularly for fiction as you need to flesh out your characters so that you can learn to think like them. However when I wrote my book, Feel It As A Man; a fool’s guide to relationships, I learnt from Mindy that mind mapping is another method.
She advised me to do a mind map of my topic (relationships), and the branches represented chapters which each had a mind map. The branches in each chapter's mind map were sub-heads and topics. Her methodology worked well for a non-fiction book in terms of the writing proccess.